CirrusPoint Solutions Inc.: Holistic Approach toward ITSM Reporting

Kevin Martin, CEO

Since 2013, CirrusPoint Solutions Inc. has been helping companies progress their ITService Management (ITSM) strategies and building enterprise use cases with some of the more advanced capabilities within platforms such as ServiceNow, and particularly in the IT operations & orchestration management space and for automating the detection of root-cause and business impact prior to ticketing. The company specializes in the real-time monitoring of assets and the operational reporting aspect of ITSM and SLA compliance.

They have been helping large enterprise organizations discover their inventory and map out the applications and infrastructure while centralizing monitoring and self-service reporting. They help consolidate all the various alerts and KPIs across IT to enable a more proactive Network and Security Operations that can address performance and capacity anomalies before causing major impact.

CirrusPoint is helping organizations establish their best-of-breed architecture and all the relevant integrations into platforms like ServiceNow. CirrusPoint helps build the integration plan and then puts it into operational use. They specialize in establishing a process to ensure credibility and accuracy in ITSM reporting by looking at the full picture across IT and then orchestrating the necessary controls to automate resolutions and response in Operations.

The following is the conversation that we had with Kevin Martin, the CEO of CirrusPoint, about the key challenges that clients face today in the ServiceNow space and how can his company help establish a more proactive IT & Operations.

What are some of the pain-points that organizational CIOs face today and how does CirrusPoint mitigate those?

Aside from the standard challenges around attaining resources, leadership, and participation, CIOs are demanding more visibility, faster delivery, and better use of all the collected data across the enterprise. They also want sound advice from trusted advisors on the neutral approaches to product selection, use, and integration. This is what we provide to our clients at CirrusPoint.

Having witnessed a lot of big enterprise architectures grow to an enormous level of complexity, it is clear to me that there’s a lot of updating and modernization that still needs to be done. There’s way too much being spent on maintaining and customizing legacy monitoring tools when there are just easier and better ways to do them today. I see huge opportunities to save and replace and fortunately it can be done in parallel and pretty quickly these days.

Our company and solution is inspired from that long standing desire for a consolidated end-to-end perspective and a simplified ‘central point’ for better visibility. A key point for CIO’s today. Our Service Dashboard solution provides service-based KPI reporting on health, availability, and SLA for corporate infrastructure, networks, virtual assets, and mission critical applications across the hybrid environment—and it’s presented in the business perspective. I also love that we’re able to provide our clients a huge library of “ready-to-use” reports and dashboards along with the ability to easily customize and expand. Everyone appreciates “quick-wins” and we love delivering them on such a large scale.

Please walk us through the Consulting services that CirrusPoint provides on the basis of its methodology, features and benefits involved.

The main focus for us is making data actionable and more useful across the enterprise business.

Inspired from a strong demand for consolidated end-to-end visibility and a simplified central point, CirrusPoint provides service-based KPI reporting on health, availability, and service levels for corporate infrastructure and applications

Anyone can collect data, but what they do with it is a different story. A simplified and automated approach makes a huge difference and we take a major interest in how we connect with the end user through the presentation layer and how data is analysed and displayed. The industry has been chasing that SPOG (single-pane-of-glass) perspective for more than 20 years, but everyone is still just ‘collecting data’ and trying to figure where to put it.. CMDB’s, Data Warehouses, Data Lakes. We help them get past that.

Most of the product vendor attempts to “centralize” have actually originated from a specific area of IT such as storage, network, security, ticketing, or an application. Just think about the products from all those companies and how they present their solutions as “all-encompassing”, however they really just focus on one piece of the architecture. There’s a long list of them. These solutions never really start from the top to represent the business in logical form and are mostly stuck in the weeds. We provide a more holistic approach to reporting and a correlated and consolidated perspective that many diverse business groups can benefit from.

I personally believe the ticketing system is a great place for incident response, but the fact is it will always be a reactive system and one based on “response” vs “prevention”. It will need support from outside solutions such as ours in order to succeed and become a truly useful tool for proactive collaboration across enterprise.

Could you please cite a case study on how you have enabled clients to overcome hurdles and attain desired outcomes?

In regards to ServiceNow, we recently helped a large global organization map out their ecommerce environment and all the applications that support it. We then prepared them for monitoring and consolidating root-cause across the various tools they owned so they could be more efficient at ticketing on actionable problems.

Our background is with large enterprise organizations and service providers, so we tend to spend a lot of time there. We recently helped one of the largest retail networks orchestrate their global perspective on ITSM and we now provide their corporate wide network performance reporting and fault monitoring. We love getting selected over major players. Our clients experience major gains within IT Operations and in streamlining their architecture and user experience across the organizational silos and disparate locations.

What are the factors that steers CirrusPoint ahead of the competition?

There are many, but a few standout such as helping organizations apply more actionable meaning to all the data produced by their many tools and sources. Organizations collect tons of data every day, but what does it mean to the business? How many problems are we actually solving with it? or better yet—how many incidents have we actually been able to ‘prevent’?

I believe you shouldn’t have to an engineer to use and navigate all the many dashboards and repositories deployed across the company. At CirrusPoint we wanted to improve the perspective so we centralize reporting and serve as that starting point for multiple parts of the business. One that’s more user friendly and easier to use. We also bring in a layer of abstraction that allows us to go beyond the boundaries of common assets in the inventory and we also provide the structure for correlation and mechanisms for discovery. Further, we employ the algorithms to allow for more intelligent ‘ticketing’ by separating the problem from the many symptoms being reported.

What lies ahead in the future for CirrusPoint?

Well we are going to continue to journey down the ITSM path and keep reminding customers not to overlook the foundational things like automated discovery, building an effective presentation layer, and using the semantic models to streamline root-cause detection and business level correlation. Those are essential if we want to evolve and improve our ticketing platforms.

We have also been growing and expanding our base in North America along with our product and solutions in a number of new areas to support IT. One of the things we’re pretty excited about right now is our new APM capabilities to extend what we do in the network and cloud as well as our business expansion out West. Most of our initial presence has been here in the Midwest and East of Chicago, but we are looking forward to growing business and creating new partnerships in the ITSM and MSP community across the U.S.

This year we plan to finish developing new analytics capabilities to help organizations measure the quality of service being delivered and provided across IT and operational providers. We already have a ton of capabilities to monitor specific assets in various areas such network, VoIP, SD-WAN, cloud, and application. The new reporting capabilities allow us to not only help organizations save millions on updating and modernizing their architecture, but now we can actually help them measure the results on a large scale.